 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to gorgeous San Diego, California. This is KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is John Troyer and this is the end of three days wall-to-wall coverage over 12,000 in attendee. Happy to welcome to the program Matt Cascio who's the executive director at the National Headquarters for the American Red Cross. Matt, thank you, American Red Cross and thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, no, thanks for having me. It's been a great conference so far. We're here to share our story as an end user on our journey with CloudNative, with Kubernetes and how that helps Red Cross do what we do, which is help people in need as best we can every day. So no matter what industry I talk to, everybody's dealing with change, there's always more things happening. American Red Cross, I mean, it feels like I hear American Red Cross mention more as time goes on because everything from things related to climate through global events and the like. So maybe before we get into some of the tech, give us your role there and how the changing world impacts your organization. Sure, so my role is to support a few different business units. One is biomedical marketing. We try to recruit blood donors to give blood at RedCrossBlood.org and other channels. That's obviously a significant part of what we do. We're a major player in the blood supply market in the US. We provide services to the armed forces in that regard as well. So that's a part of it. Part of it is I work with humanitarian services group as well to recruit financial donors and recruit volunteers. That's primarily through RedCross.org, at least as far as my group goes, and then corporate brand marketing and chapter related marketing and communications. So all of that happens through RedCross.org and RedCrossBlood.org and some related platforms. Those are flagship brand products. Okay, and what led to American Red Cross being part of this cloud native computing ecosystem? Our journey is a lot like a lot of other folks. We had a very monolithic type of architecture. We had all of these different business units with different priorities, different timelines, different needs wrapped up into one big monster of a platform that kind of bundled up risk for everybody in this one platform. And we'd always have collisions of priorities mostly, not to mention the resource issues of who's going to work on what at what time. And so a few years ago, we started talking about breaking that down and we've been lucky to have some technical leaders that are very aware of and welcoming to new cloud native technologies. We decided at that time to pursue a cloud native architecture. And what we have today a few years later is two years worth of being in production with a platform that runs on Amazon. We take advantage of a lot of the native orchestration tools there for running our clusters. And we've been able to service those different needs in a much more nimble way. We can release something for RedCrossBlood.org without risking much on the financial donation side or on the volunteer recruitment side. And likewise, for those other groups, we can kind of separate out the risks for each of those groups. And that's been a great benefit. You've been on the vendor side, the for-profit side. Is IT very different at the non-profit? If you're looking, people are looking to get high out there. Yeah, you know, I have been doing it a long time, a lot of different perspectives, but I think what I try to do and what I think I've seen work best is when IT is not the ticket taker, integrated with the business, I'm very fortunate to have some business partners at RedCross that collaborate every day. We're having conversations every day. We have some people on our team that feel as though they're accountable for business outcomes, not just doing cool technology things. For example, multi-year evolution of process related to being more agile. We've got so much more integration and communication with business teams that have gone from something like one release every five months to we now do two a week. And I think we could do more, it's just we don't have the need to do more. And that's a huge, huge big lift. There's a lot of conversations that need to happen to make that work. Yeah, it's all a journey, right? We're all improving, continuous improvement. But so a follow-up there. So as an IT leader for a very large organization, one of the things people are saying this year is wow, the conference is big. So many new technologies, so many new companies, so many new open source projects. You know, you're in the middle of this journey, you can't screw it up, right? That would be disastrous. So how do you, how do you, how does you and your organization look at new technologies and pick out which new technologies to try and incorporate them into your stack and your portfolio? Right, so we wanted to be cloud native. We wanted to do, you know, focus on projects that where we knew there were skills in the marketplace that we could acquire at our price point. You know, we try to be good stewards of donor dollars. At the end of the day, you know, all the money we have comes from folks like you and you guys who support Red Cross, you know, and thank you very much for all that generous support. And so we try to spend that money, you know, very carefully. We have some people who are, you know, employees on our team, about 25 or so. But one of the great things we've been able to do with some of these technologies now is we have a program called Code for Good. It's a volunteer workforce where we're here recruiting volunteers with this skillset that, you know, they have a day job, but they have an interest in supporting Red Cross, maybe not financially, maybe not with their blood, but they can give us some time and their skills. And we run it like an open source project. We set out a roadmap of features for, you know, six months or so. We have planning sessions. We say, listen, you know, if you can sign up for a feature that, because you have two hours this week to work, great. You have six hours, great. You just had a baby and you're not available for three months, fine. You know, we want to have a, you know, a bench of people that can self-select based on their time commitment, what to work on. And somehow it's been working great. You know, we started this in June. We have about 30 volunteers now. And we've already delivered an app for Slack that is kind of a workplace app where you can, you know, if your organization works with us, you can donate right from Slack. You can give a schedule of blood donation appointment, do kind of things like that. Yeah, I love that model. It's something that, you know, we've looked at years ago that kind of micro participation, if you will. Yes. You know, you think it's like, you know, Wikipedia wouldn't have been built if it wasn't for everybody, just spending a little bit of time on it. I'm curious, does something like participating with, you know, this ecosystem have generalized tools that people know and can plug in with as opposed to, you know, having to know your direct stack? Is that helpful to kind of be able to recruit people into that environment? You know, what are the kind of most needed skills and usages that you're recruiting for? Yeah, it is. You know, our learning curve at this point is much smaller than it was on our previous platform because of the fact that we're using technologies people are familiar with. You know, things like Docker, we use a lot. We just started evaluating Prometheus another CNCF project for monitoring some non-prod systems. Hopefully that'll graduate into production systems. So from a technology standpoint, yes, we find that, you know, the people we talk with can walk in and be productive sooner. You know, there's still the Red Cross specific things they need to know about, you know, how we do business, but, you know, at least at this point it's that and not some proprietary system that they also have to learn. Any learnings that you've had participating in the CNCF with the rollout of the technologies that you share with your peers? You know, I love the CNCF is very maintainer driven, you know, end user driven. I heard today at one of the analyst panels I did, I think maybe 30% of people here are end users. That's a pretty large number. You know, the fact that we can come here and learn about technologies, meet people, meet vendors, meet some of the people contributing code. It's a lot different than, you know, maybe some at sponsored by a for profit vendor that wants to, you know, generate leads and sell you things. It feels much more community driven here and open to lots of different perspectives. Nice. And so now what are you looking forward to in the next few years, both in terms of your stack and maybe, you know, coming back to KubeCon? Yeah, you know, we, it's funny, we've started to see other parts of Red Cross come to us to learn about Kubernetes because the vendors they work with are mentioning these things and we have been early adopters as far as, you know, Red Cross goes, our group. And I think it's great if we can, you know, expand usage of, you know, cloud native technologies to other parts of the organization and really get some economies of scale. So that's part of what we're trying to do is kind of internal consulting, knowledge sharing, collaboration. And then as far as what we're doing on our team, you know, we just really want to focus on, we're at a stable point in the platform and then we want to do some things around monitoring and alerting that, you know, reduce those incident outages to nothing, hopefully, and work on that. And you're looking on a few projects that are being worked on here for that? So yeah, this Prometheus project, like I said, we're piloting that, you know, I would say in four or five months time, we'll know if that's going to be something we can, you know, put some more investment into. All right, Matt, want to give you the final word, RedCross.org slash code for good, I believe the website, what else? RedCross.org, code for the number four, good. And, you know, if you're interested in volunteering, we need technical skills, we need team leadership skills, product owner skills, so it's not just about, you know, developing features and ops engineers as well. So thanks for your time. Want to say hi to my daughter, Peyton. It's late on the East Coast, so go to bed now. But thanks folks, appreciate it. All right, well Matt, and actually that is the final word for our day one of coverage for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to join us tomorrow. We've got two more days, wall-to-wall coverage here, lots of great speakers, really appreciate when we've got the end users on. Matt, thank you so much and, you know, great mission, the code for good. We definitely hope that the community here, you know, reaches out and connects and participates. So that's it for today. Thanks is all for watching theCube.